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Mobile Suit Gundam: Where to Start and What's Worth Watching [2024 Edition]

Uh....The 00 review mentions a very important plot point that the author was not paying enough attention too while writing/watching.

spoiler[There was absolutely no fan created backlash to use the twin as a stand-in. The twin was introduced in Season 1 fairly early on before said characters death in a flash back (episode 9). Yes, it's a blink and you miss it moment, but they very clearly planned to do that from the start.]

Girls were the ones watching Gundam from the get-go.

ATastySub wrote:

Girls were the ones watching Gundam from the get-go.

Of course girls always watched the same stuff boys did, but Wing seemed like the one that seemed to attract a lot more female viewers to the franchise thanks to the pretty boys and it was the one all the girls I knew at the time got into as opposed to G Gundam which aired in a similar time. Granted, the Gundam fandom is still 90% male today but even just a little headway is kind of impressive, no?

They meant in Japan. Gundam was always being watched by girls ever since it first aired in 1979, and while the reruns were what helped make it popular overall back then it was still usually the female fans who were the most hardcore. Even Tomino has admitted this in interviews.

oilers2007 wrote:

ATastySub wrote: Girls were the ones watching Gundam from the get-go. Of course girls always watched the same stuff boys did, but Wing seemed like the one that seemed to attract a lot more female viewers to the franchise thanks to the pretty boys and it was the one all the girls I knew at the time got into as opposed to G Gundam which aired in a similar time. Granted, the Gundam fandom is still 90% male today but even just a little headway is kind of impressive, no?

They meant in Japan. Gundam was always being watched by girls ever since it first aired in 1979, and while the reruns were what helped make it popular overall back then it was still usually the female fans who were the most hardcore. Even Tomino has admitted this in interviews.

No I meant it universally. Especially when someone is claiming the fandom is “90% male” which is a ridiculous statistic for any piece of media, much less Gundam where women have always been a major part of it. Like whatever space he’s used to where it’s only men is more indicative of the outlier spaces he’s discussing Gundam in and not actual reality.

As someone who has yet to meet a Gundam entry I didn't like I might be a bit biased, but I gotta say listing ZZ and Victory as a No and Char's Counterattack as a maybe is an absolute Travesty. CCA is the Culmination of Char and Amuro's character arc and a wonderful thematic climax to everything spinning out of the OYW, like it's up there with Ghost in the Shell 2 Innocence as "admittedly imperfect things I love to no end and will always go to bat for."

Also I wouldn't really recommend G-saviour to anyone but it's a specific kind of "shot in Canada live action sci-fi TV movie" bad I was actually sorta nostalgic for so I ended up liking it anyway.

ATastySub wrote:

No I meant it universally. Especially when someone is claiming the fandom is “90% male” which is a ridiculous statistic for any piece of media, much less Gundam where women have always been a major part of it. Like whatever space he’s used to where it’s only men is more indicative of the outlier spaces he’s discussing Gundam in and not actual reality.

It's probably not as ridiculous as you might think. According to the December 2023 issue of Nikkei Entertainment Gundam skews very heavily male with only Yurucamp and Yu-Gi-Oh beating it down in terms of the amount of male domination in the fandom. Only IPs that got at least 50,000 responses were tallied.

Similar polls in the past like one from NHK showed a similar male dominated results in a poll of 1.7 million respondants.

I doubt anyone but Bandai knows the exact numbers, but I didn't think it'd be controversial for someone to say Gundam skews heavily towards guys given all the info we do have. Unless you have your own data that shows otherwise, of course.

There are so many levels of sexism in this post I don't even know where to start.

The extremely old "women only care about clothes" is too tepid and stale to really acknowledge beyond a mild inquisition. Are you a time traveler from the 1970s? Have you encountered any women or girls outside of a stereotypical teenage rom-com? As a woman with probably more investment in my wardrobe than most, I can tell you that most women you're encountering are not spending a boatload of cash on high-end fashion, and the basics are comparable in price for men and women unless you're buying everything off the rack at Wal-Mart.

Your sexist assumption about women's fixation on fashion laughably extends to cosplay, as if the ability to cosplay a character is the foremost reason why women would engage with an entertainment property. Most fans, including women, are not cosplayers. Most people watch a TV show because they enjoy the story; it's funny, exciting, or thought-provoking. There are surely professional cosplayers who do focus on popular characters to help them make a living, but this is a small percentage of your average fan and not characteristic of female fans as a whole.

Also, it is an extremely strange assumption that women cannot afford Gunpla and clothes simultaneously. Or, more to the point, you've assumed that women don't have hobbies other than purchasing clothing and that their sole interest absorbs all their expendable income, which is, frankly, a baseless and asinine conclusion.

You've managed to paint women as some sort of singularly focused, shopping-obsessed creature. It's regrettable that we have to be confronted with, much less entertain, these kinds of attitudes still. It's exhausting.